Commercial Pension Insurance: Its Role for the Improvement of Pension System(No.23, 2017)

2017-04-05

Abstract: At present, pension insurance in China is facing a number of issues such as inadequate aggregate pension assets, imbalanced supporting structure for pension system, huge pressure for sustained development of basic insurance and restrictions on enterprise annuity development. Developing commercial pension insurance can increase pension assets, adjust the structural imbalance of pension system, relieve the pressure for sustainable development of basic insurance and supplement the shortage of enterprise annuity. It plays a significant role in perfecting the three-pillar-based pension system. Commercial pension insurance is featured by an accessible mechanism, effective incentive mechanism and flexible operation mechanism, which is beneficial for market mechanism to play a role in pension system. As China boasts a high saving rate, it has a large room for development. However, the development of commercial pension insurance cannot meet market demand due to a number of reasons including high basic pension collection rate, imperfect preferential tax policies and insufficient supply. We need to have a clear-defined development goal, implement preferential tax policies and enhance supply efficiency so as to construct a policy framework for commercial pension insurance development.